Unexpected Connections

I don't believe it.

(i) Poul Anderson's use of the word, "brake," reminded me of a poem that I had read at school so I linked to that poem here.

(ii) Then I googled that poem's author, Alfred Noyes, who turns out:

to have converted to Catholicism;

to have written an sf novel, The Last Man, which is thought to have influenced 1984.

(iii) Mary Shelley, who wrote the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, also wrote an sf novel called The Last Man. (I have a copy but have not read it.)

(iv) Olaf Stapledon wrote Last And First Men and Last Men In London.

(v) Anderson's Genesis, Stapledonian in scope, readdresses the Frankensteinian question whether it is right to create human life.

(vi) "The last man on Earth knew not that he was."
-Poul Anderson, "In Memoriam" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), pp. 57-67 AT p. 59. (The opening sentence of the story.)

One universe encompasses the imaginations of Shelley, Stapledon, Noyes, Orwell and Anderson.